On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 4:30 PM, Geoffrey Fox <g...@grids.ucs.indiana.edu>
wrote:

It is hard to say whether and when it'll use grid economy.
Currently we have sporadic cases of entire chain (like Amazon Compute
Cloud), where you have supplier of compute capacity (S), third parties (R),
consumers (C) charged flat or variable fee for amount of resources (CPU-hour
or a combination of metrics).

Lets consider why almost all entities of cloud computing ecosystem might be
interested in it.
For simplicity, I omitted an imported hidden entity - hardware vendors (H),
who sell more units, necessary to power the cloud.
Suppliers (S) benefit from selling at wholesale prices and having margin.
Third parties (R) serving as retailers, resell compute capacity in different
forms, such as hosting websites, SAAS etc. This area is growing, since it
gives huge cost savings to resellers. Consumers (C) also benefit from
cheaper services.

Going further, there's a question whether this economy would use trading
model(using market-based resource management and scheduling) or keep
proprietary chargeback schemes.
In my opinion, once it enters the stage where retailers of compute capacity
(or it's large clients) need to manage the risk of availability of compute
capacities, there will be obvious need for regulated market.

regards,
Khaz Sapenov